I think it was back in the 1950's that I heard this song fragment. Hollywood make a black and white film about "Bull" Halsey, the WW2 Navy Admiral. At the end of the film, as the credits were running, this male solo voice sang these four lines:

"I knew a man who went to sea, And left the shore behind him, I knew him well, that man was me, But now I cannot find him."

The melody was haunting, modal, you could sing it all with two chords: D and C.

I've always wondered if this was piece composed by someone for this film, or if it may be a fragment of something longer, perhaps traditional. Does anyone else remember this piece, or have any information?

Helen, Thank you very much for finding this information. You hit it right on the head. It's funny how time warps ones memory. I remember the film as being in black and white, and it was in color. But, being colorblind, color is not one of the first things I notice or remember. CHEERS, Bob(deckman)Nelson

Deckman said "It's funny how time warps ones memory. I remember the film as being in black and white, and it was in color. "

I had the same experience recently, watching a new DVD of a classic old Alec Guiness/Peter Sellers comedy, "The Ladykillers." I was amazed to see it in color, since I remembered it as strictly B&W.

Finally realized why: I never saw it in a theater, but watched it many times on late-night 1950s TV -- before color TV. Even though the movie was filmed in technicolor, the television broadcast version was ncessarily monochrome. Deckman, this is probably the same thing that "colors" your memory of "Ther Gallant Hours."

(For those too young to know, color came to film many years before TV.)

A query at militarymusic.com--by someone who is apparently looking for the same song--says Roger Wagner was the conductor, and the words and music to the theme song were written by Ward Costello. (Ward Costello, a.k.a. Edward Costello, was the actor who played Captain Harry Black in the film.) I don't know whether this information is reliable.

Colour in film was of many various processes - incuding splitting, filtering and putting the images on seperate places on the film stock - colour was available in the 1930's - nazi documentary films were often in colour, as was a lot of US war footage.

Don't forget that quite a few popular films have now been computer "colorised" too - the cost is getting cheaper all the time.

Very interesting, albeit inconclusive. Neither Pavlina nor have seen this movie, but she ran across a snippet today on YouTube, including the intro singing of it, and we're both eager to know where it came from.